Moroccan Activists Globalize Their Struggle: System Change Not Climate Change

As the 22nd Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP22) opened in Marrakesh this week, social justice movements have gathered in a village on its outskirts at the gateway to the Sahara to define their own proposals to combat the increasing threat of climate change. Va Campesina, hosted by Morocco's National Federation of Agricultural Unions (FNSA), has strategically chosen this political moment to hold a climate justice training for its constituencies and close allies with a focus on youth and women, and on strengthening its understanding of issues in the Middle East and North Africa.

The peasant movement is no stranger to the world of climate negotiations and the social justice spaces that run parallel to them. At COP13 in Bali, Va Campesina took a firm stance with transnational indigenous and environmental justice movements against the injection of forests into the market for speculation through Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+). In Durban at COP17, the movement organized a caravan that travelled across the southernmost part of Africa with the message that small farmers are cooling the planet through food sovereignty and agroecology--a counterpunch to climate-smart agriculture, which was being unveiled as part of the official negotiations. And last year in Paris at the highly anticipated COP21 where a global treaty was signed, Va Campesina was extremely well organized and critical of the text of the Paris Agreement that put profit before the planet in the form of unmatched carbon markets as a 'solution' to the twin challenges of global warming and ocean acidification.

Here in Marrakesh, the task at hand is twofold. For those governments and corporations inside the tent city constructed for COP22, it is to define and decide how to implement the Paris Agreement. Alternately for the social justice movements at the nexus of food sovereignty and climate justice, the way forward involves giving voice and political power to marginalized people.

"In the context of the U.S., we see the most hope in Indigenous, Latin@, Asian and African American solutions--the people living on the frontlines of extraction who are standing up in defense of water and land," offered Jaron Browne, an organizer with Grassroots Global Justice and ally representative at Va Campesina's climate justice training. "Right now 5,000 indigenous people are putting their bodies on the line at Standing Rock against the Dakota Access Pipeline. These are the struggles from which solutions are born, and the more we converge as movements, the more power we build to change the system."

System change is an expression of root cause analysis, which is a critical part of what Va Campesina is doing in Morocco this week. Instead of jumping haphazardly from the problem of the climate crisis to solutions, activists are affirming that they must first get to the heart of its contention.

"Climate change is a manifestation of capitalism," said Maria Isabelle Soc Carillo, a youth leader from Va Campesina's Guatemalan member organization CONAVIGUA, who traveled from Central America to be part of the training. "The solutions proposed in the COP generate more poverty because they cause dependency, and that impacts women and children the most," she elaborated. Maria's organization is part of a push against climate change mitigation strategies in the form of industrial tree plantations and monocrop agriculture primarily marked for export.

Democratic Moroccan social movements fear that holding COP22 in Marrakesh will accelerate land grabbing in their own country. The evening before the official COP convention opened, FNSA and its close environmental justice and human rights allies held a public forum for international civil society. There, Moroccan peasants and their global counterparts testified against land and natural resource grabbing. A woman had the audience in tears when she shared the story of her village of some 3,000 people in the northern part of Morocco. Peasants like her have been battling a mega-project that will turn their farms into a golf resort that is backed by the monarchy, and in doing so, evict a community that has worked that land for centuries.

Morocco's decision to open its doors to multinational climate mitigation initiatives is likely to put the North African country in a further downward spiral of speculation, land concentration, and resource grabbing. FNSA is determined to halt and rollback this form of neocolonialism by building a mass movement for food sovereignty, agroecology, and climate justice. The movement sees its political partnership with Va Campesina as a step in that direction.

"We are honored to host this historic training with our Moroccan, regional, and international youth leading the way," said Said Khir Allah, Secretary General of FNSA, adding, "this encounter is sure to reinforce our global work".

The opening day of the climate justice training included an exploration of the crisis of capitalism, a history of struggle and convergence, and a positioning of the COP21 Paris Agreement. Now into the second day, delegates are sharing testimonies from their regions--from the struggle against occupation in Palestine, to islanders' fights for fisheries reform in Indonesia, to urban strategies towards energy sovereignty in Brazil. In the coming days, Va Campesina will fine-tune its proposals around food sovereignty and climate justice and visit grassroots farming communities near Agadir.

"We're just getting started!" beamed Said.